Monday, November 14, 2011

Fit 7, pg. 73/2 … there's nothing like a good ol' delhi sandwich with extra snark and hold the marx

The Banker’s annihilation, or rather, impending deracination, at the hands of a Bandersnatch provides an excellent opportunity to shift the entire setting of this Snark into the farther reaches of the British Raj. We are in Old Delhi now and in the background of this Fit one can spot the distinctive silhouette of Delhi’s Red Fort, the last bastion of the Mughal emperors.

As for the Bandersnatch … modern Delhi is plagued by monkeys (they’ve even assassinated the deputy mayor) and the word for these sacred and homicidal creatures in Hindi, bander, combines perfectly with snatch for our deadly, Nonsensical purposes.

Was this deliberate on Carroll’s part? Who knows. Both the bander and his hookah have ensnared our Banker into playing the fatal role of the priest Laocoön, as immortalized in the immensely influential Greco-Roman sculpture of the same name.

The Laocoön: the marriage of rhetoric & draftsmanship … yow!

No scene of Carrollian tragedy would be complete without a pun of some sort and in this case, I’ve ensured that the cheque drawn to bearer really does bare her. Such a splendid specimen of well-inked feminine Snark-hunting pulchritude, eh, Carroll sahib?

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NB. Apropos of nothing in particular except the desire to emphasize the importance of being paid to any young illustrators/writers/designers who happen to be reading this, Harlan Ellison has this to say:

… I did a very long, very interesting on-camera interview about the making of Babylon Five early on. So she calls me and she tells me they’d like to use it on the DVD, and can that be arranged? And I said, “Absolutely, all you gotta do is pay me,” and she said, “What?” And I said, “You gotta pay me!” She said, “Well, everybody else is, just, you know, doing it for nothing.”

There's more here and it's worth reading. If the suits are stiffing Harlan Ellison, what do you think they're going to do to the likes of you and me? And doesn't this imply that certain artists/writers with marquee value equivalent to Mr. Ellison must be doing it for free?

As the prostitute Miss Trixie put it in Jacques O'Bean's classic satire of American politics & mores, American Candide:

“Doctor Pantone always said that the business of Freedonia is business … That means don’t do anything for free, unless you want everyone to disrespect you and call you a really cheap slut. And that kind of sucks.”

2 comments:

Aaaaaah...I am going to by heart Harlan Ellison's stuff so that I have it at the tip of my tongue next time some cheapo asks me for a free drawing.And one of those **** amateurs at Pencil Jam got a sound piece of professional advice from another when he sold his work to a friend of $1. Will make a blog post.

Yes, some people don't seem to grasp what it means to be told that one's work is good enough to hang on the wall but not good enough to pay for. These are the same people who pay hundreds of dollars to hang a plasma TV screen on the wall which then spews complete rubbish at them day and night.

I think that artists have become the bicycle rickshaw wallahs of culture, everyone wants a free ride.

Look forward to reading your post and of course, seeing more of your great drawings!

Since 1985 I've worked on a variety of SF, humor, children’s and
literary titles such as Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner D.A. Powell’s
Cocktails, BSFA-award winner Adam Roberts’ 20 Trillion Leagues Under the Sea and Martin Olson’s NYT-best selling Adventure Time Encyclopaedia. My novel, American Candide, has just been published by Rosarium Publishing.